


'cause honey, we're something old (and something wholly new)

by HereComeDatBoi



Series: you're the one that's making me strong [18]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Adam is Stressed TM, Adashi Month 2019, Also there's a cat, Cooking, Domestic Fluff, Family Feels, Gen, M/M, Married Adam/Shiro (Voltron), Not for long tho, Parenthood, Shiro being proud, Shiro's cooking to be precise, Valentine's Day Fluff, adam and shiro are soft as cotton and their babies are even softer, adashi babies being adorable, because he's a dad, better late than never amirite, even though it's almost September, his husband and babs are gonna fix that, which is good!, y'all know the drill by now
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-30
Updated: 2019-08-30
Packaged: 2020-09-30 12:40:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20447303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HereComeDatBoi/pseuds/HereComeDatBoi
Summary: “But it’s the fourteenth, and the concert―we had front-row seating, and the girls were going to―”“Don’t worry about it, sunshine,” smiled Shiro, kissing him once on his forehead and twice on the bridge of his nose. “We can do Valentine’s Day after all this blows over, so go wash up and I’ll get some breakfast ready."On their seventeenth Valentine's day together, Adam and Shiro's date plans fall prey to a family emergency. But luckily, Shiro's got a backup plan and two small partners in crime to help him save the day.





	'cause honey, we're something old (and something wholly new)

**Author's Note:**

> Here I go again with the oneshots that get too long to fit in one chapter. Rip.

Ever since the winter he first started dating Adam, Shiro’s favorite holiday had been Valentine’s day. 

They never did anything particularly elaborate in their early years together, he remembered. Both of them had only a small spending allowance before they graduated and started their teaching jobs at the Garrison, so they celebrated their first two Valentine’s days with handmade cards and presents from the campus gift shop―but by the _ third _Valentine’s they had bank accounts and enough to spend on a proper date, so Shiro took Adam to an upscale restaurant for dinner after they finished their evening teaching shifts. 

“There’s so many people here,” Adam had whispered, opening his menu and leaning over to kiss Shiro’s cheek. “How did they even have room for us?”

“Um, I made reservations,” answered Shiro, fighting the urge to bite his nails as a waiter came over to take their orders. “This is pretty much the only good date spot near campus, so I had to book it back around New Year’s.”

“Wow.” Adam looked around at the flowerpots and the open rafters on the ceiling, and then at the sparkling lily fountain a few feet away from their table. “Remember when we used to come this way with Matt after getting sundaes from the ice-cream shop?”

“Yeah, and the time the chief cook came out to scold us all for getting fudge on that front window when we leaned in too close.”

“I can’t believe that was just three years ago.”

“But we weren’t together three years ago,” Shiro reminded him, heart starting to flutter in his chest as Adam flashed a dazzling grin at him. “It feels like a lifetime ago, for me.”

“I knew you were the one ever since the day I first saw your mochi face,” giggled Adam. “So it’s hardly been a change at all on my part.”

“R-Really? I never knew.” Shiro felt his face burn crimson. “I mean, I knew too, but I didn’t know that _ you _did.”

Adam threw back his head and laughed, and besotted as he was Shiro thought that his laughter sounded like a string of Christmas bells, or the low-pitched windchimes in the Garrison’s little desert garden―

“Are you ready to order?”

“Oh, yes! But I wanted to ask about the _ zeleny _borscht versus the beetroot kind, is it…”

* * *

On their seventeenth Valentine’s day together, Shiro awoke to the wrenching feeling of his husband sliding out of his arms. It was a trial he suffered every day, he thought glumly; Adam quickly adjusted to his childhood sleep schedule after they moved to the Ahluwalia farm, waking with the sun to milk the cows and begin his other duties for the morning―but Shiro had struggled just to make the switch from waking up at seven to waking up at six-thirty, and as the cold air crept deeper into the blankets he put his arms around Adam’s waist and tried to tug him back down.

“Love, the alarm hasn’t even gone yet,” he mumbled, burying his face between Adam’s shoulders and making a soft noise of protest when he refused to lie down. “_ Janu, _what―”

A second later he realized that Adam was sitting upright and arguing in rapid Hindi, holding his watch’s mouthpiece up to his lips and grimacing at every other sentence as his aunt Uma’s voice drifted over the speaker. She seemed agitated, Shiro thought, or peeved at the very least, and after about five minutes of what sounded like apologies from her end, Adam said goodbye and dropped straight onto Shiro’s chest with a groan. 

“One of our major chains just emailed and said they want to update the sales contract,” he huffed, glaring at the ceiling as Shiro leaned over and kissed the sleep from his eyes. “And they want to meet and talk about it this afternoon. It’s the only day they’ve got open this month, apparently, so I’m going to have to drive to the city and deal with their representatives.”

“Are they the produce chain that your cousin took to court before?”

“The ones that almost dropped us last year over fruit size, yeah,” Adam sighed. “We’ve got time to find another buyer by next season if they do end up pulling out, but I’d rather not deal with all that until I have to. And if it takes a trip to Ahmedabad to keep them around, then―well, you get the picture.”

“What about the legal team?”

“Shanti’s in Dholka already, so she’ll meet me there,” said Adam distractedly, climbing out of bed and barrelling into the bathroom to wash his hair. “I swear to God, I―”

He stopped and pulled his datapad out of his pocket again, bringing up the lock screen and staring at it in silence for a moment before turning back to his husband. 

“It’s the fourteenth,” he murmured, drawing his eyebrows together in a frown as Shiro got up and started digging through their closet. “And the concert, we had front-row seating and the girls were going to―”

“Don’t worry about it, sunshine,” smiled Shiro, kissing him once on his forehead and twice on the bridge of his nose. “We can do Valentine’s Day after all this blows over, so go wash up and I’ll get some breakfast ready. Are you taking the second dress shirt?”

“I might as well, since I’ll be a mess by the time I get to their headquarters either way. Can you put the steamer in my bag, too?”

“Done, honey. Poached eggs or scrambled?”

“Poached with cheese toast, please. The plain kind.”

After yet another kiss (which turned into two, and then three) Adam finally managed to let go of Shiro and make his way to the shower, filling the room with the scent of his favorite body wash as Shiro put his head into the nursery to check on Sonia and Himeko. The two little girls were fast asleep, as they usually were at six o’clock in the morning: tucked up beneath a heap of soft quilts, with nothing to show they were there at all except a tuft of fluffy brown hair and a pair of long black braids.

“_Ohayou, _ Sherani,” Shiro whispered, as something small and furry jumped off Himeko’s dollhouse and streaked away down the hall. Both he and Adam tried to keep the kitten off the furniture, and never quite believed Sonia’s assurances that she only ever slept _ under _the bed and not on it; Shiro often found suspicious bits of fur on the sheets while doing the laundry, but in the end it hardly mattered. Sherani kept herself meticulously clean, and unlike all the other cats on the farm she had never minded baths. 

“Well,” he chuckled, following the ball of black fluff into the kitchen and getting out a carton of eggs. “I guess you want breakfast too, huh?”

Sherani mewed at him. 

“Only a little bit of egg, Sher-chan. And not poached, okay? I’ll give you a bit of _ tamagoyaki _after the girls wake up, but this one’s just for Adam.”

He cracked the eggs and dropped them into a pot of hot water, starting his timer before going to the pantry and pulling out two slices of cheese bread. They went into the waffle iron, rather than the toaster; Adam had always loved making brownies and sandwiches into waffle shapes, and after the little ones came along he and Shiro found themselves using the waffle-maker more often than they used the oven. 

“_Janaana! _” he called, sliding the bread onto a plate and topping each piece with an egg. “Are you ready?”

“Almost!” came the muffled reply from their bedroom, followed by a groan and a crash that sounded like the coatrack falling over. “I’ll be there in a minute, ‘Kashi.”

Adam emerged three minutes later, dressed in a fitted purple blouse and dark slacks with a coat draped over his shoulders. He had also replaced the rubber backings on his earrings for gold ones, and when Shiro saw the bright yellow studs twinkling through his hair he stumbled backward and almost burned his hand on the stove. 

“Did you have to?” he said hoarsely, blinking like a stunned owl as Adam pulled him over to the sink. “As if you weren’t bewitching enough with the plain findings, love.”

“How do you notice every little thing about me when you keep on saying you need glasses?” chided Adam, pouring a mugful of cold water over his hand. “Oh no_ , _it’s turning red. Wait just a minute, moonlight, I’ll go get the burn paste.”

“It just grazed me,” Shiro whispered, tucking a stray curl behind his husband’s ear. “I’m fine, sweetheart, don’t worry.” He leaned forward, hopelessly caught in the lure of Adam’s soft eyes, and when Adam’s arms reached up around his neck their lips met almost of their own accord: as slowly and surely as a pair of colliding stars, until something beeped against Shiro’s chest and startled them apart. 

_ “Reminder: taxi arriving in twenty minutes.” _

Shiro looked down at the flashing smartwatch and sighed. 

“Breakfast, baby. You’ll be late,” he sighed, pouring hot sauce over Adam’s eggs and setting the plate down in front of him. “Should I make tea? There’s still some hot water left in the dispenser, so it won’t take long.”

“You know you’re not making it easy for me to leave you, right?”

“I should hope not, _ koishii_.”

“You―!” Adam flushed scarlet. “You can’t just―”

“Can so. I married you, Adam Umarzai, so I’m the only one who can call you that.”

“But―”

“_Koishii, _my darling, king of my heart and life and home―”

“_Takashi! _”

* * *

Over the course of the next two hours, Shiro went out to collect the eggs from the chicken coop and drive the cows to pasture before running back to the house to cook breakfast for Sonia and Himeko, who were now beating their little spoons on the table and singing along to the crackling love-ballad on the radio between bites of rice and _ nori_. There was a minor upset when Himeko knocked over her cup of tea, but for the most part the meal went off without a hitch; the girls had woken up with good appetites, and steadily ate away at their omelets and grilled salmon until their plates were empty. Himeko tried sneaking fish to Sherani only twice, which Shiro counted as a victory: but he had already given her a bite of egg, and as far as he knew canned food was much better for cats than salmon. 

“Tou-chan!” Himeko cried, looking up at him with pleading eyes as he bundled the kitten off to have her own breakfast in the corner. “Sher-chan just wanted a little.”

“She’s already had her treat for the day, baby. And she’s a cat, she meows whenever she wants to say something.”

“Yesterday she meowed in my ear because she didn’t like how my pink sweater feels,” said Sonia meditatively. “She only stopped when I went to put on my yellow one, so maybe she just doesn’t like Hime-chan’s shirt.”

“She wants to go to the concert,” said Himeko, brightening up as her father laughed and gave her a slice of raisin bread. “Can she?”

“We can’t go the concert today, Hime-chan. Papa got called into the city for a contract meeting, so we’re not doing our Valentine’s day this year.”

“But Papa goes to the city every weekend,” Sonia protested. “Won’t he be back in the afternoon? The concert’s at five o’clock.”

“No, _ soniye. _One of the produce chains is giving Uma Maasi trouble again, so Papa had to go figure everything out with Shanti.”

“Was it that mean company again?” cried Sonia, springing out of her chair in a fit of righteous anger. “The one that said they didn’t want to stay with us because our strawberries are too little? A pound of strawberries is a pound no matter how big they are, and ours taste the _ best! _Papa should have taken me, I’d have yelled at them.”

“Yelling isn’t nice,” Shiro reminded her, wiping a few grains of rice off her cheeks. “Even if someone’s being mean. And it _ is _ their right to change farms each season, _ provided _they give us enough warning and stay within their terms of the contact...which they aren’t doing, but Papa isn’t going to yell at them. Papa never yells, and you shouldn’t either.”

“But _ still― _”

Sonia stopped in her tracks at the sound of a whimper to her left, followed by a pitiful little cry as Himeko’s fork clattered onto the floor. 

“No Valentine’s day?” she wept, pushing her small pink fists into her eyes. “Why did Papa go away, tou-chan? Is he never coming back?”

“He’s coming back tonight!” Shiro assured her, clearing away the remains of Himeko’s breakfast and bundling her into his arms. “It’s just that he won’t get home in time for the concert, that’s all.”

“But what about our valentines?”

Shiro sighed and tucked her head under his chin, wishing with all his might that the produce chain could have waited just one more day to start being completely unreasonable. Valentine’s day had been something of a family affair ever since Sonia was born, since both he and Adam were uneasy leaving her with a sitter to go out on a date―so they decided to stay home instead, and spent the night lighting firecrackers and feasting on frozen pizza bites. 

But as Sonia grew older, her parents had become a bit more adventurous; the twenty-first century throwback concert was something neither of them would have even dreamed of attempting a few years previously, but now that Himeko was nearly four and old enough to sit through it without falling asleep or crying for her own warm bed Adam had been willing to try. 

And now their preparations had come to nothing, all because of a company that would rather risk a lawsuit than fulfill its seasonal contract. 

“Tou-chan? You ‘kay?”

“I’m fine,” he sighed, falling flat on the yellow tiles with Himeko still perched on his chest. “I wanted to give your papa a really special Valentine’s, that’s all. We used to love going to concerts when we were young, and I know for a fact he hasn’t been to one since before I went to space. That’s more than thirteen years now, you know? He was looking forward to it so much, and we’re not going to have another chance to see the band until May. I don’t even think I’ll be able to get tickets for it, since I booked these last autumn.”

“Can’t they make more space?”

“They’re booked solid, honey. I would have if I could, promise.”

Sonia blew her bangs out of her face and flopped down onto his stomach, wriggling like a worm until she had made herself comfortable next to Himeko. “So what do we do now?”

“Wait for Papa to get home, I guess. I’m going to make dinner, and get some candles, and flowers...he’ll love it no matter what, I know, but that’s not enough.”

“Papa will love it, tou-chan,” said Himeko seriously, pressing a tiny kiss to Shiro’s nose. “Promise.”

“Papa will love whatever tou-chan makes, but he’s right,” Sonia countered. “It’s not enough. At all.”

“Ouch, _ soniye. _”

“It’s true!” cried the little girl, waving her small pajama-clad arms about and knocking Shiro’s prosthetic straight through the door to the garden. “Dinner and flowers is first-date stuff. Papa told me that’s what you did when you were eighteen, and now you’re _ old_.”

“Thirty-five isn’t old, moonbeam.”

“It’s older than eighteen.”

“Lots of ages are older than eighteen. Nineteen, for one.”

_ “Tou-chan!” _

“Sorry, sorry,” he laughed, summoning his arm back. “What do you think we should do instead?”

“Thinking caps on,” Himeko announced, patting her soft brown hair and frowning adorably as Sonia mimicked her expression. “No dinner and roses, tou-chan. Something nice.”

_ Dinner and roses— _

Shiro caught his breath and stared out the window, suddenly feeling as if he were almost seventeen years into the past and half a world away—surrounded by the mouth-watering scents of buttery sauces and slow-braised meat as he stared at Adam’s bright face, and leaning across the table for a kiss until their waiter cleared his throat to call them to attention. 

_ “There’s so many people here. How did they even have room for us?” _

_ “Um, I made reservations? This is pretty much the only good date spot near campus, so I had to book it back around New Year’s.” _

_ “Remember when we used to come this way with Matt after getting sundaes from the ice-cream shop?” _

_ “Yeah, and the time the chief cook came out to scold us all for getting fudge on that front window when we leaned in too close.” _

_ “I can’t believe that was just three years ago.” _

_ Three years, _ Shiro thought, heart filling up with something rich and bittersweet like dark coffee mixed with cream. Three years had seemed like a lifetime then, but now twenty-one had come and gone since he and Adam first drew together—twenty-one springs and summers and winters, twenty-one Christmases and forty-two birthdays, each one exactly like the last and yet somehow wholly new. 

“We’re going to go forever, Takashi,” Adam had whispered one night, as they lay on the floor of Curtis Bradley’s bedroom after an end-of-finals bash in their senior year with Matt sprawled over their legs like the world’s most ungainly starfish. “Don’t know how I know, but I do.”

_ Oh, sweetheart. _

_ So do I. _

“Tou-chan? _ Tou-chan! _”

“Huh?” he coughed, jerking back to the present as Sonia poked his cheeks. “What is it?”

“What’s your idea?”

Shiro bit his tongue and pulled out his datapad, starting a Google search for “restaurants in Maricopa, AZ” and scrolling through the results until he came to a link titled _ The Dapper Lighthouse. _He clicked on it and pulled up the menu page, glancing between colorful pictures of entrees and wine until he found three familiar-looking dishes right at the very bottom. 

“Is that near the Garrison, tou-chan?”

“Mhm, it is,” Shiro said absently. “Tomato salad with avocados, seafood chowder, and raspberry cheesecake. That’s what your papa and I had on our very first real Valentine’s date, Hime-chan.”

“Was it good?” she wondered, squinting at the pink-and-white cake on the screen. “It looks funny.”

“It was nice, but not really anything to write home about. Ours is going to be delicious, though.”

“Ours?” asked Sonia. “What do you mean?”

“_Soniye, _Hime-chan,” he told them seriously. “I’ve just come up with the perfect plan to save Valentine’s day for everyone, but it’s a big job, so I’m going to need your help. What do you say?”

“...I’m hungry.”

“Baby, you _ just _had breakfast—”

“I say aye! Stop teasing, Hime-chan.”

“Aye, tou-chan, aye!”

**Author's Note:**

> Side note: expect the next chapter of Heaven, On His Shoulders up in the coming week! 
> 
> come say hi on tumblr/twitter at @datboicomehere!


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